2010/05/31: Reuters: Rich-poor rifts stall progress at U.N. climate talksU.N. climate talks opened on Monday, exposing familiar rifts between rich and poor countries which delegates said were likely to delay a re-start of formal negotiations. The 185-nation Bonn conference, which will run until June 11, is the biggest international meeting on climate change since a summit last December in Copenhagen failed to agree a new pact. Several countries said they could not give a green light to formal negotiations on a new text published in mid-May and which outlines a huge range of options for fighting climate change.

2010/05/31: ABC(Au): Negotiators face slow grind at climate summitEnvironmental groups are urging countries to accelerate action on a new international deal on carbon emission reductions in the first climate change talks since the Copenhagen summit last year. Delegates from around the world have converged on the German city of Bonn as talks begin between representatives from 190 countries.

2010/05/31: EarthTimes: New UN climate change talks pin hopes on Mexico summitBonn – Around 5,000 delegates from around the world began talks in Germany on Monday in a renewed attempt to bring the United Nations’ climate change negotiations on track, ahead of another summit in Mexico later this year. The beginning of the UN conference, set to last almost two weeks, aims to set a framework for discussions ahead of the November summit in Cancun.

2010/06/01: BWeek: Forest Plan by Australia, Europe Faces Climate VetoPapua New Guinea is among developing countries that may veto a plan at United Nations talks by nations including Australia to count carbon dioxide stored in vegetation such as trees as part of their emissions targets. Industrialized countries may overstate projected carbon emissions from logging and land use and then take credit when greenhouse-gas output falls short, said Kevin Conrad, Papua New Guinea’s lead climate negotiator. Trees absorb carbon when they grow and release it when they rot or burn. “It’s climate fraud,” Conrad said in an interview in Bonn where delegates are meeting to lay the framework for a climate treaty later this year. “We’d rather have lower overall emissions cuts than dishonest numbers.”

2010/05/31: Guardian(UK): Copenhagen climate failure blamed on ‘Danish text’The UN’s climate change chief blamed a secret draft treaty, leaked to the Guardian, for the summit failureDrip by drip, the full story is emerging of last December’s global diplomatic debacle in Copenhagen, when instead of setting the world on a new low carbon path and tackling climate change, 130 world leaders ended up with a weak deal and no prospect of a binding agreement for another 18 months. The latest revelations come from the man at the very heart of the debacle, UN climate chief Yvo de Boer. Normally the model of a discreet and guarded international bureaucrat, his confidential letter of explanation to his colleagues, written only days after the meeting ended, displays a mix of bemusement, clarity and exasperation. “How could several years of negotiation and high level diplomacy be allowed to end up this way?”, he asks. The letter appears in a new Danish book by journalist Per Meilstrup. His letter puts the blame squarely on Danish PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his presidency of the summit. He identifies the war which had been going on between Rasmussen’s office and Danish climate chief Connie Hedegaard’s team in the energy ministry. Hedegaard stood down halfway through the summit. The key event, he suggests, was Rasmussen’s draft text. This, known widely as the “Danish text”, was due to be wheeled out just when the talks reached a deadlock, as they were bound to do. The trouble was, implies De Boer, the text was clearly advantageous to the US and the west, would have steamrollered the developing countries…

2010/05/31: EarthTimes: Too many leaders ‘paralysed’ Copenhagen climate talks, book claimsCopenhagen – The presence of over 100 world leaders at the Copenhagen climate summit in December paralysed decision-making, the outgoing UN climate chief says in a new Danish book published Monday. The Danish hosts were also partly to blame for the failed outcome at the Copenhagen conference after a draft document was leaked, Danish author Per Meilstrup said, quoting an email from Yvo de Boer, who July 1 is to leave the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC). “[The Danish text] destroyed two years of effort in one fell swoop,” de Boer wrote in the email to colleagues after the talks. “All our attempts to prevent the paper happening failed. The meeting at which it was presented was unannounced and the paper unbalanced.” The Danish draft was presented to a few countries including the US, China and Russia. It was obtained and published by the British newspaper The Guardian, angering other countries.

2010/05/31: Scotsman: Climate change cash ‘must not be loans’The annual £69 billion pledged by rich countries to help poor nations deal with climate change must not be given as loans. Oxfam warned yesterday that such a move would simply increase Third World debt. The aid agency also said the amount provided for developing countries to develop without polluting and handle the impacts of rising temperatures needs to double to £137 billion a year.

2010/06/02: UN: Agriculture, energy sectors to shape sustainability of future development – UNHow the world contends with the agriculture and energy sectors will serve as a bellwether for development in the 21st century, largely determining whether growth will be sustainable for billions of people, according to a new United Nations-backed report. With current production and consumption of fossil fuels and food draining freshwater supplies, triggering losses of forests and other ecosystems and raising pollution levels, the study concludes that dramatically reforming, rethinking and redesigning how the planet’s people are fed and fueled could spur environmental, social and economic returns.

2010/06/04: IndiaTimes: India asks UN to take tough stand against protectionismIndia has demanded that the UN prevent any green protectionism by developed countries and include an explicit statement in the opening charter of any new deal to block carbon-based taxes being imposed on exports from developing countries such as India. The statement to the effect was made by the Indian delegation at the start of climate negotiations in Bonn on Tuesday.

2010/06/04: CanWest: Worst retreat of Arctic sea ice in thousands of years — studyA major international study of Arctic sea ice has concluded that the recent, record-setting retreat is the worst in thousands of years — a conclusion that challenges skeptics’ claims that the meltdown being witnessed in Canada’s North is probably just the latest low ebb in a historical cycle of ice loss and regeneration. The new study, involving 18 scientists from five countries and to be published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, includes data from two Canadian co-authors who interpret historic levels of ice cover from ancient whalebones found throughout the polar region. Other evidence marshalled in the bid to reconstruct ancient Arctic climate conditions include patterns of driftwood deposit and chemical signatures in seabed sediments and ice cores.

2010/05/31: NYT: Virus Ravages Cassava Plants in Africa[…]…a new and more damaging virus named brown streak, for the marks it leaves on stems. That newcomer, brown streak, is now ravaging cassava crops in a great swath around Lake Victoria, threatening millions of East Africans who grow the tuber as their staple food.[…]The threat could become global. After rice and wheat, cassava is the world’s third-largest source of calories.

2010/06/04: BBC: Academic quits GM food commiteeA UK academic has resigned from the steering committee of the Food Standards Agency’s public dialogue on the use of genetic modification. Professor Brian Wynne from Lancaster University, who was vice-chairman of the group, raised doubts about its impartiality. In a resignation letter, he said he was concerned that the agency operated from a pro-GM policy stance. But the FSA said it was committed to a balanced public dialogue on the issue. Professor Wynne’s resignation from the committee comes just a week after that of Dr Helen Wallace, director of UK public interest group GeneWatch. She said the committee’s dialogue was “an integral part of the GM industry’s public relations strategy”.

2010/06/04: G&M: The numbers say it all: Canada is a climate-change miscreantThe annual report required by all signatories to the original Kyoto Protocol is depressing[…]According to the government’s own numbers, actual emissions will grow in absolute terms in every year from 2009 to 2012. All the government’s many and expensive policies will have done is to slow the increase, and then only slightly — by 10 million tonnes in 2012, against countrywide emissions of more than 700 million tonnes.

2010/06/03: BBC: EU ‘half way to 2020 emissions target’The EU is more than halfway to its target of cutting emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020, a report shows. The assessment by the European Environment Agency (EEA) reveals that emissions across the 27-nation bloc fell by 11.3% during 2008. However, the EEA adds that the global economic downturn played a key role in the reduction.

2010/06/01: CBC: U.S. says greenhouses gases to rise by 2020In its first major climate report to the United Nations in four years, the United States reported Tuesday that its projected climate-warming greenhouse gases will grow by four per cent through 2020. The first such report submitted under the Obama administration includes a 1.5 per cent rise in carbon dioxide emissions, the main gas from fossil fuel burning blamed for global warming. But it’s the culpability of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs — promoted worldwide to replace chemicals that harm the globe’s ozone layer — that gets a starring role.

2010/06/01: PlanetArk: Indonesia Palm Expansion To Halve With Climate DealIndonesia’s annual oil palm expansion may halve to 50,000 hectares from 2009 levels once a $1 billion climate change deal with Norway comes into effect next year, a top industry official said on Monday. Following a financing deal signed with Norway last week, the Southeast Asian country plans to revoke existing forestry licenses held by palm oil and timber firms to save its vast rainforests and peat lands that are seen as a carbon sink. The government has promised land swaps for cancelling some forest concessions, a process that may take years to fine tune and also prevent the world’s No. 1 palm oil producer from achieving its 40 million output target by 2020.

2010/06/02: CBC: Quebec fires under controlQuebec’s fire prevention agency said Wednesday that there are no longer any fires out of control in the province, but 1,300 people are still unable to return home. Rainfall on Tuesday and Wednesday helped firefighters put out some of the nearly 60 fires that were burning a few days earlier, bringing the number down to 29 by Wednesday afternoon.

2010/06/04: G&M: Melting glaciers unearth new challenges — Roads, buildings, rail lines and airports will cost more to replace as their foundations turn into sludgeAt first sight, it seems to stretch forever: a vast river of white ice, rising up into the sky, its edges framed by a translucent blue piping. Sixteen kilometres north of this picturesque Alaskan fishing village, Exit Glacier is rare – the only one in Kenai Fjords National Park that you can reach on foot. A rock-bordered path cuts through an area of recently glaciated terrain, a spur trail lined with indigenous fireweed continuing to the glacier’s edge. To stand at its base is to be in awe. The glacier is fed by the enormous Harding Icefield, which accumulates 400 to 800 inches of snow each year. It takes between 30 and 50 years for that snow to compress into glacial ice. Looking around, there are no obvious indications of a glacier in retreat. The evidence, however, lines the path to the glacier’s edge. You notice them on the ascent, small wooden signs with numbers: 1921, 1955, 1967. They represent where the front of the glacier existed that year.

2010/06/01: CBC: Chrysler, Ford report May sales up [in Canada] — Toyota, Honda see volumes fallFord sales improved by 19 per cent, to 26,122, while Chrysler’s rose 53 per cent to 20,887 from 13,657 in the same month a year earlier.[…]Toyota Canada’s volumes fell 16.1 per cent to 17,879 Toyota and Lexus cars, trucks and SUVs. Honda Canada reported a drop in combined sales by its Honda and Acura divisions to 11,587, a 26 per cent decrease over last year. Hyundai Auto Canada Corp. reported an increase in sales of 13 per cent to 12,620.[…]Subaru Canada, Inc. announced a new record for May with sales of 2,436 units, up 25.6 per cent over the same month last year… Kia Canada announced sales of 5,731 vehicles — an increase of 13.9 per cent over the previous May …

2010/06/02: Eureka: Going underground to monitor carbon dioxideA technique originally, applied to monitor the flow of contaminants into shallow groundwater supplies, has been repurposed to monitor carbon dioxide pumped deep underground for storage. Electric Resistance Tomography (ERT) has been installed to track where a plume of injected CO_ moves underground in an oil field (Cranfield Oilfield) near Natchez, Miss. The site is part of the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB), a project that eventually will store more than one million tons of CO_ in underground formations. The ERT project at Cranfield is the deepest (10,000 feet) subsurface application of the method to date.

2010/06/06: ABC(Au): Sea ice scientist wins national awardA Tasmanian electrical engineer has developed technology to more accurately measure the thickness of snow on sea ice in Antarctica. 27-year old Natalia Galin has successfully modified a NASA radar for use in helicopters, to monitor changes to the ice.

2010/05/31: EarthTimes: Australians losing interest in climate change issueSydney – Australians are losing interest in global warming, according to an opinion poll released Monday showing less than half of them now consider it a serious problem. The latest annual poll by Sydney’s independent Lowy Institute showed 46 per cent of respondents really worried by climate change, compared with 68 per cent four years ago. Thirteen per cent of the more than 1,000 respondents said the science of climate change was still in dispute, up from 7 per cent in 2006 when the poll series started. One-third of respondents in the poll with a 3-per-cent margin of error said they were not prepared to pay anything to address what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd famously called the “greatest moral challenge of our time.” That compares with 21 per cent when the same question was asked in 2008.

2010/06/03: C-a-S: Legacy of an Energy Boom[…] the legacy of George W. Bush’s two terms, in all things related to domestic energy development, from deliberate lax oversight to eye-popping corruption, looms large today.

2010/05/31: Guardian(UK): Government review to examine threat of world resources shortageStudy commissioned following sharp rises in commodity prices on world markets and food riots in some countriesForest managed for timber near Jokkmokk, Sweden The review will examine a potential shortage of resources including timber. Peter Essick/Aurora/Getty Images Ministers have ordered a review of looming global shortages of resources, from fish and timber to water and precious metals, amid mounting concern that the problem could hit every sector of the economy. The study has been commissioned following sharp rises in many commodity prices on the world markets and recent riots in some countries over food shortages.

2010/06/02: EurActiv: EU energy strategies ‘overlook heat losses’EU energy strategies are currently overlooking significant energy savings that could be achieved with an integrated approach that allows the use of waste heat, according to Fiona Riddoch, managing director of Cogen Europe, and Sabine Froning, managing director of Euroheat&Power. They spoke to EurActiv ahead of their joint annual conference today (2 June).

2010/06/02: PlanetArk:EU Debt Crisis Boosts Chance Of Energy Tax OverhaulThe greenest fuels would become the cheapest under plans for a pan-European energy tax which would also help governments tackle huge debts without raising taxes on workers, draft documents show. The European Union’s executive wants to overhaul Europe’s 240 billion euro ($294 billion) annual taxation of energy, which varies widely between countries and often creates paradoxical incentives that encourage the biggest polluters.

2010/06/02: ABC(Au): Water scientists urge big Murray-Darling extraction cutA report on sustainable extraction from the Murray-Darling Basin proposes an almost 40 per cent reduction in water availability. The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists has released its report in anticipation of highly-debated sustainable diversion limits that will be set in the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s plan later in the year. The report says about 4,400 gigalitres need to be taken away from irrigators and returned for environmental needs.

2010/06/04: CanWest: Fish-bearing lakes to be destroyed to become tailings ponds: Council of Canadians to sue federal government over Fisheries Act amendmentMore than a dozen fish-bearing lakes across Canada, including one near Williams Lake, could be destroyed because of a legal loophole intended to allow mining companies to use dead lakes for dumping waste, says the Council of Canadians. The organization will launch a legal challenge today seeking to overturn Schedule 2, an amendment to the Fisheries Act that allows mining companies to dump toxic waste in lakes and rivers by reclassifying them as “tailings impoundment areas.” That means companies can strip lakes of their normal habitat and use them to stockpile mine tailings, large piles of crushed rock and chemicals left over after metals have been extracted.

2010/06/04: G&M: The numbers say it all: Canada is a climate-change miscreantThe annual report required by all signatories to the original Kyoto Protocol is depressing[…]According to the government’s own numbers, actual emissions will grow in absolute terms in every year from 2009 to 2012. All the government’s many and expensive policies will have done is to slow the increase, and then only slightly — by 10 million tonnes in 2012, against countrywide emissions of more than 700 million tonnes.

2010/06/04: G&M: Emissions reductions 10 times less than government’s projections: reportCritics say results show Harper government failing to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas pollutionEnvironment Canada overestimated by 10 times the amount of emissions reductions that result from government measures when it reported last year on its efforts to meet this country’s obligations under the Kyoto protocol. What is more, although Ottawa started handing over the first installments of a five-year $1.5-billion Clean Air and Climate Change Trust fund to the provinces in 2008, the federal government cannot monitor them or verify whether they are being spent for the intended purpose. Those findings are in the fourth instalment of an annual report on the Kyoto Protocol that Environment Canada completed last month.

2010/06/01: CanWest: Another member quits federal fertility agency — Calls For ReviewAnother board member has suddenly quit the troubled federal agency meant to police Canada’s thriving fertility industry, prompting calls for a public investigation of the organization and its controversial record. Irene Ryll, who runs an Edmonton support group for parents using reproductive technology, handed in her resignation over the weekend, becoming the third director in 2½ months to leave Assisted Human Reproduction Canada (AHRC).[…]She [Jocelyn Downie, a bio-ethicist at Dalhousie] noted that the seven remaining directors include Dr. John Hamm, former Conservative premier of Nova Scotia, and three people who have espoused conservative positions on such issues as abortion and embryonic stem-cell research.

2010/05/31: CBC: Chevron’s N.L. spill of drilling mud questionedA professor of environment studies in Ontario is raising questions about a 2007 spill of drilling mud off the coast of Newfoundland by Chevron Canada Ltd., which is currently drilling a deepwater oil well there. Chevron spilled 74,000 litres of synthetic drilling lubricant — referred to as drilling mud in the oil industry — in the Orphan Basin in January 2007. “What happened with that spill? We don’t know. We just know that the spill occurred,” said Gail Fraser, a professor of environmental studies at York University in Toronto.

2010/05/31: CBC: Sewage, jet fuel spilled in ArcticMillions of litres of harmful contaminants — including sewage and jet fuel — have been spilled across great swaths of Canada’s pristine Arctic in recent years, an analysis by The Canadian Press has found.

2010/05/31: Yahoo:CP: Spills in North run to millions of litresMillions of litres of harmful contaminants — including sewage and jet fuel — have been spilled across great swaths of Canada’s pristine Arctic in recent years, an analysis by The Canadian Press has found. A classified government database reveals the alarming extent to which Canada’s North has been an accidental dumping ground for dangerous liquids. And it shows one of the most frequent offenders is the federal government. This never-before released information comes to light as the Harper government reviews its Arctic environmental-protection rules in the wake of a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

2010/05/31: CBC: Layoffs at Chalk River nuclear facilityAtomic Energy of Canada Ltd. is laying off about 50 employees at its Chalk River facility in eastern Ontario, the union that represents government scientists says. The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada called the layoffs announced Monday at AECL’s research and technology division “poorly timed.” The union said that the layoffs, including a dozen people it represents, compromise the future of Canada’s nuclear industry. It also said the move will have serious consequences for the availability of medical isotopes.

2010/06/02: CBC: Protesters filmed at Alberta upgrader hearingPrivate landowners who protested outside a public hearing into an bitumen upgrader northeast of Edmonton Tuesday were filmed by security guards hired by the project proponent, French energy giant Total S.A., CBC News has learned. “What are they so afraid of?” landowner Anne Brown asked on Wednesday. “Why are they taping us?” The two men videotaped the group as they held a peaceful protest outside the Fort Saskatchewan hotel where the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) is holding a hearing into the project. When they were confronted by the landowners, the men identified themselves as security guards and said they would be handing the tape over to their employer, whom they declined to identify. That employer was later revealed to be Total.

2010/06/03: EnergyBulletin: Deepwater Horizon and the Addiction to GrowthThe Gulf of Mexico oil blowout carries the emotional wallop and learning potential of a near-death experience. First, it certifies that the age of cheap and plentiful oil is over. Second, it reveals that our collective faith in technology to overcome any challenge posed by nature is a dangerous delusion. Third, it may be the event that sets our nation on the path to genuine economic and ecological sustainability.

2010/05/31: CanWest: New nuclear plants carry more risk, report finds — Huge cost overruns, waste management crises predictedThe latest generation of proposed multi-billion dollar Canadian nuclear plants could be up to 158 times more hazardous than their predecessors, opening the door to massive cost overruns and possibly forcing taxpayers to pick up the tab, warns a report released today. The report, The Hazards of Generation III Reactor Fuel Wastes, says the risk is primarily due to uncertainty about what will happen to radioactive uranium fuel after it is used. “Canada’s present generation of nuclear plants was built with no prior plan as to how to manage the radioactive wastes it would produce,” said the report, prepared by independent consulting firm, Radioactive Waste Management Associates. “Canada is arguably on the cusp of repeating this mistake.”

2010/05/30: WaPo: Radioactive fish near nuclear plant said ordinaryMontpelier, Vt. — When a fish taken from the Connecticut River recently tested positive for radioactive strontium-90, suspicion focused on the nearby Vermont Yankee nuclear plant as the likely source. Operators of the troubled 38-year-old nuclear plant on the banks of the river, where work is under way to clean up leaking radioactive tritium, revealed this month that it also found soil contaminated with strontium-90, an isotope linked to bone cancer and leukemia. Three days later, officials said a fish caught four miles upstream from the reactor in February had tested positive for strontium-90 in its bones. State officials say they don’t believe the contamination came from Vermont Yankee.

2010/06/02: EconBrowser: EIA: Hard Core Peak Oil ForecastThe EIA has gone hard core.The EIA, the statistics arm of the US Department of Energy, recently released its International Energy Outlook (IEO) for 2010. This is an important document for forecasters, as it represents the EIA’s integrated view of the global energy markets in the years to come and contains a long term forecast on the range of energy sources and CO2. Like it or hate it, the IEO is a touchstone for the energy industry and is treated as the authoritative government forecast in the press and in capital raising documents like prospectuses. It influences policy-makers, the media, public opinion and investors. What it says matters.And what does it say?That peak oil is all but on us. And that’s new.

2010/05/31: Guardian(UK): Government review to examine threat of world resources shortageStudy commissioned following sharp rises in commodity prices on world markets and food riots in some countriesForest managed for timber near Jokkmokk, Sweden The review will examine a potential shortage of resources including timber. Peter Essick/Aurora/Getty Images Ministers have ordered a review of looming global shortages of resources, from fish and timber to water and precious metals, amid mounting concern that the problem could hit every sector of the economy. The study has been commissioned following sharp rises in many commodity prices on the world markets and recent riots in some countries over food shortages.

P.S. Recent postings can be found in the week archive and the ancient postings can be accessed here, which should open to this.

“The new paradigm of power, coupled with its bizarre ideology of limitless progress and impossible happiness, has turned whole nations, including the United States, into monsters. We can march in Copenhagen. We can join Bill McKibben’s worldwide day of climate protests. We can compost in our backyards and hang our laundry out to dry. We can write letters to our elected officials and vote for Barack Obama, but the power elite is impervious to the charade of democratic participation. Power is in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls who are ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And appealing to their better nature, or seeking to influence the internal levers of power, will no longer work.” - Chris Hedges